Be you a real hard care dropper who gets about 1000 ECs a day or some or some relaxed dropper who earns 50 ECs a day, I don’t think you are using your credits to advertise randomly on just any blog. I believe there are many things you take into consideration. Let’s try to have a look at some of them.

Random advertising

Maybe I was just nuts when I thought you won’t advertise randomly n just any blog. I have done it many times and I am still doing it now. In some life situations, random can be a solution. Random advertising is mostly used by people who haven’t really decided on their advertising style. I bet even the pros use it for testing. Even right now, I am still dong it. However, don’t think I engage into random advertising blindly. After engaging into random advertising, I spend about 30 mins analyzing my results and improving on my advertising style.

Niche Based Advertising

Generally, we believe if your ad is on a blog whose content is related to yours, visitors to that blog may show some interest and click through to visit your own blog. This is very close to being true, but will not really work for you if your ad (Entrecard Badge) does not clearly define your niche or blog’s content. Let’s take my case for example. All that which can be seen on my Entrecard badge is AZ. To all you who have been dropping on me and commenting here, you know what AZ means. What about a “stranger”? What I am saying here is, if you want to use niche advertising as a strategy, then your Entrecard has to be as explicit as possible, and not just AZ or some “meaningless picture”.

Price Based Advertising

This style of advertising is based only on cost, and nothing else. While some bloggers prefer advertising on a 256-credit blog, others will prefer using the 256 credits on advertise on sixteen 32-credit blogs. Under normal circumstances, sixteen 32-credit blogs should give you more exposure than one 256-credit blog. But again comes this question. Is advertising only about exposure? What about credibility? If someone sees your ad on a 256-credit blog, he might just look at you to be more important than another ad placed on a 32-credit blog. Before you go into price based advertising, there is one question you should really ask yourself. Do advertising costs really reflect the value of blogs?

Popularity Based Advertising

If advertising cost was proportional to blog popularity, then we won’t be including this paragraph in this post. Click on any blog category on the Entrecard Website and I bet you will find some blogs with higher popularity but slightly lower advertising costs. At the time of writing this post, my blog’s popularity on Entrecard was 586, and advertising cost of 256 but the blog just directly behind me (with a lower popularity obviously) had an advertising cost of 512 (doubling mine). Someone who chooses to go by popularity will obviously want to spend 256 ECs on my blog than 512 ECs on the other blog. It all depends on how you do the math.

Above are some of the methods I use in advertising at Entrecard, and I believe any blogger will use at least on of these methods. However, I do believe experience is the best teacher, so there is a possibility of another method. Let’s check it out.

Go to your Entrecard account and click on the statistics tab. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and check out the last two tables named “Top clicks by widget” and “Best value by widget”. Those tables are very easy to understand. Just read through and you will get it! The table named “Top clicks by widget” gives you a list of blogs on which advertising gave you the greatest number of clicks to your blog. The second list named “Best value by widget” gives you a list of blogs on which you paid lowest per click. When advertising, I give top priority to blogs that feature on these two tables. What about you?

What is most important to you when it comes to choosing where to spend your ECs for advertising?

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